On Sat, 26 May 2001 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Fri, 25 May 2001 18:12:30 EDT, Steve Sobol said:
Perhaps there is no inherent difference in throughput, but the files are necessarily larger when sent through e-mail, as they must be base64 encoded.
There's no *inherent* reason they *must* be base64 encoded. Please note that all the way back in RFC1341, in addition to a CTE of 'base64', there's the '8bit' and 'binary' CTEs. Sendmail started having sane support of '8bit' way back in 8.7, in 1995. RFC3030 defines the BDAT extension for SMTP.
Now, the major real-life reason why encoding is needed is because Sendmail 8.12 still doesn't have BDAT support. If there's sufficient real-world demand, it's probably implementable fairly easily (a quick readig of RFC3030 and the Sendmail 8.12 source doesn't pop out any astounding show-stoppers)...
If there's a lot of demand for it, I'll see what it would take to get it onto the Sendmail 8.13 feature request list....
Besides interoperability concerns with current software that will have to become 'legacy', you will open the gates to any hacker and script kiddie that can now mail you their favorite virus, trojan or worm just as is was compiled. It's bad enough that unprintable characters and buffer overflows in the header must be neutered. Scary stuff that you haven't even thought of could happen with 8 bit message bodies... --Mitch NetSide